> the only ones who really benefit from linux on the handsets are shareholders of the > manufacturers themselves
In some cases the handset vendors (or their linux OS vendors) contribute improvements back to the community, to the betterment of a variety of linux-based consumer electronics devices (such as improvements in XScale PXA27x platform support that largely resulted from Motorola's use of that platform for various phones).
It's based on an ARM processor, so should this device ever take off, the ARM Linux port could easily be customized to take advantage of all the features.
And at least some of the onboard devices will also be supported in Linux. A port of the i.MX21 ADS board is in the works, which has a fair amount of overlap with the Jazz board.
whatever happened to all their embedded consumer devices (I think it was branded "cool city")?
Cooltown was (and perhaps is, although the web site seems to have been diverted toward another program) a research project, not a product line, generally looking at interesting uses for web-connected mobile devices. (But it's probably fair to say the research hasn't obviously engendered a swarm of web-connected mobile device products from HP.)
Some of the HP Adaptive Enterprise / IBM On Demand/ Sun N1 messages are solidly based on common sense stuff like automating IT management. Some of it is related to emerging business models like "capacity/infrastructure/etc. on demand" that aren't necessarily well established now. Some of it is based on stuff industry research labs have been saying are some of the next big things for about 3-4 years now, but are entirely unproven: IT provisioning tied to "business logic", "utility computing" outsourced data centers where shared resource pools are dynamically reassigned among customers according to demand and service level agreements, and so on.
Even the people asked to research/design/implement/market this stuff seem to have a hard time getting a handle on what they're really doing, in part because the goals are so lofty and vague, and in part because few people seem to have an idea how the dodgier parts will really be solved (or why a new approach is even needed).
MontaVista has announced that it runs their Linux, so technically it should be able to run arbitrary Linux stuff. But information on how to download applications and on applications that are hooked up to the phone's buttons and display might also be needed... If it does run Qtopia then there are a lot of Qtopia applications available.
The article mentions a PCMCIA slot on the ref design development sled; support for CompactFlash, microdrives, etc. is certainly an option for PDA products based on e-LAP platforms.
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> the only ones who really benefit from linux on the handsets are shareholders of the
> manufacturers themselves
In some cases the handset vendors (or their linux OS vendors) contribute improvements back to the community, to the betterment of a variety of linux-based consumer electronics devices (such as improvements in XScale PXA27x platform support that largely resulted from Motorola's use of that platform for various phones).
And at least some of the onboard devices will also be supported in Linux. A port of the i.MX21 ADS board is in the works, which has a fair amount of overlap with the Jazz board.
Cooltown was (and perhaps is, although the web site seems to have been diverted toward another program) a research project, not a product line, generally looking at interesting uses for web-connected mobile devices. (But it's probably fair to say the research hasn't obviously engendered a swarm of web-connected mobile device products from HP.)
Some of the HP Adaptive Enterprise / IBM On Demand/ Sun N1 messages are solidly based on common sense stuff like automating IT management. Some of it is related to emerging business models like "capacity/infrastructure/etc. on demand" that aren't necessarily well established now. Some of it is based on stuff industry research labs have been saying are some of the next big things for about 3-4 years now, but are entirely unproven: IT provisioning tied to "business logic", "utility computing" outsourced data centers where shared resource pools are dynamically reassigned among customers according to demand and service level agreements, and so on. Even the people asked to research/design/implement/market this stuff seem to have a hard time getting a handle on what they're really doing, in part because the goals are so lofty and vague, and in part because few people seem to have an idea how the dodgier parts will really be solved (or why a new approach is even needed).
MontaVista has announced that it runs their Linux, so technically it should be able to run arbitrary Linux stuff. But information on how to download applications and on applications that are hooked up to the phone's buttons and display might also be needed... If it does run Qtopia then there are a lot of Qtopia applications available.
The article mentions a PCMCIA slot on the ref design development sled; support for CompactFlash, microdrives, etc. is certainly an option for PDA products based on e-LAP platforms.